Given their pricing (and the pricing of nearest competitors), combined with the relatively solved technical problem areas they operate in (connect to a data source, do some human driven NLP, draw a graph, show a map, map everything to some ontology), what they do is very ripe for some serious open source disruption.
The easy part is really the interface and information displays, the harder part (and where they make the lions share of their money) is in data connection services and software customization.
Building an Open Source Palantir tool wouldn't be all that difficult, in fact a great many organizations just build some subset of that tools using readily available open source components and with tighter coupling to their business needs. But these efforts are fractured and disorganized and there isn't a great centralized open source tool that really replicates their system.
Should there be? I think the general problem of pulling together lots of information into a common pool, then being able to annotate that data and map it to a semantic model is useful, and it generalizes well. But at the same time, many many sources of data are already available in nice semantically organized ways, with simpler interfaces (think IMDB, Pouet, Wikipedia, etc.) it's not quite clear that their approach offers enough payoff over these easier methods.
The easy part is really the interface and information displays, the harder part (and where they make the lions share of their money) is in data connection services and software customization.
Building an Open Source Palantir tool wouldn't be all that difficult, in fact a great many organizations just build some subset of that tools using readily available open source components and with tighter coupling to their business needs. But these efforts are fractured and disorganized and there isn't a great centralized open source tool that really replicates their system.
Should there be? I think the general problem of pulling together lots of information into a common pool, then being able to annotate that data and map it to a semantic model is useful, and it generalizes well. But at the same time, many many sources of data are already available in nice semantically organized ways, with simpler interfaces (think IMDB, Pouet, Wikipedia, etc.) it's not quite clear that their approach offers enough payoff over these easier methods.